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Prologue and Chapter 1 of Venom Spear: Blades of Grass Book 1
The first book in the Cascadia Fallen spinoff series launches on 1/31! Enjoy the prologue and Chapter 1!
PROLOGUE
Over the Hindu Kush Mountains, Afghanistan
“Danger close!” 1st Lt. Freeman Louis “Super Bert” Caldwell heard in his helmet headset. “T-Man is on the ridges to our north, west, and southwest. One hundred meters and closing!”
Caldwell knew that was what the Joes called the Taliban. It sounded like the mother of all firefights raging in the background. Americans were about to die.
“Bert, I just went Bingo,” he heard his wingman say. Captain Scott “Snooze N” Nethers was his closest squadron buddy and mentor. He was letting Bert know that he was now at the point in his fuel level that he had to make the twenty-five-minute flight back to base and land. The pair of Fairchild Republic A10 Thunderbolts—known affectionately by the ground troops as the “Warthog”—had been providing close air support for almost three hours. They had already performed an aerial refueling before receiving the call for support, meaning they were now bound to return to base. Not that it mattered—both planes had already run themselves low on ammo.
“I’m good,” Super Bert Caldwell replied. “I can make at least two more passes!”
“You’re full of it! Let’s go. Ratchet and Clank will be on site in thirty minutes.” Snooze ordered.
“Listen to those guys, Snooze!” the young pilot countered. He was three months into his first combat tour after college and training. “They’re surrounded and cut-off from their QRF! They don’t have thirty minutes!”
“Bert! Stop!” the more seasoned pilot warned the rookie. “See that fog that’s rolling in?!”
It was too late. Freeman Caldwell—Lou to his friends back home—lined up on the southwest-to northeast approach into the valley once more, disappearing from Snooze’s view as he did. The greenish-brown electronic map in the upper-left corner of his cockpit dashboard moved the mountains slowly as he once again progressed along the canyon walls. He reached down to his left. He felt for the correct switch to move from the HF frequency he had been talking to his wingman back to FM.
“Echo 3, this is Whisky Flight 2! Keep your heads down!”
Super Bert reached down to near his left hip and flipped the little red safety cover over the power cutout to his GAU-8 30mm cannon. He was hot, once again, to spew his depleted uranium projectiles into the enemies of brethren unmet. He had achieved his nickname as a token of supposed embarrassment from his squadron mates. The seven-barrel rotary cannon in the Warthog’s nose makes a very loud “brrrt” belch-type sound when firing at its fixed 3,900 rounds-per-minute rate. Pilots would normally fire in one to less-than-two second bursts. Super Bert had demonstrated the ability to make precise micro adjustments in flight, engaging as many as fifteen percent more targets on each pass when compared to his peers.
Left hand on his throttle, he trimmed his ailerons and reduced throttle just a bit, nudging his right hand on the joystick a hair left as he did. He was trying to get right in line with the top of a canyon wall he could no longer see due to incoming fog. The reduction in throttle caused a slight loss of lift. He couldn’t mess with this technique too much—the cannon was calibrated to shoot 4000 feet ahead when the craft was at a down-attitude of thirty degrees. Sweat built on his brow under the already hot helmet. Super Bert shot his eyes back and forth from the left side display, his heads-up display, and the window, nervously trying to find the top of the canyon. A quick altimeter check…one last look at the HUD…
BRRRRRRTTTTT….BRRRRRTTTTTT….BRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTT! Lou Caldwell hit the throttle and re-engaged the cannon’s safety switch, pulling slightly back on the yoke. If he had the fuel to make one more pass, he didn’t want to waste it climbing to altitude and rolling over to look when visibility was garbage anyhow.
“Whiskey Flight 2, Echo 3!” he heard the ground troops’ TACP, or Tactical Air Control Party, call him once more. “Nice shooting, flyboy!” The operator on the ground had the training and expertise to manage all aircraft involved in the mission. “Stand by! Standby. EVAC units are inbound! Visibility is nil. Copy?”
“Copy, Echo 3. I’m past Bingo. You’ll have Whiskey 3 on scene in ten mikes,” he said in the military radio jargon that meant ten minutes. “I’m RTB.”
“Echo 3 copies.” As Super Bert began to head back to Bagram Air Base, he switched his radio back to pre-programmed HF frequency and began the procession home.
***
Back in FOB Camaro near Jalalabad, a senior colonel had been listening to the entire operation from the Tactical Operations Center. The Brigadier General-select had already been given his flag announcement, due to take over as Inter-Agency Operations Director at Joint Special Operations command as a new general in two months. His Rangers had been stuck on this Charlie Foxtrot mission for almost two days, and he wasn’t going to sleep until they were home. It wasn’t until two hours later that one of the TOC’s radio technicians informed him that they heard Whiskey Flight 2 had crashed four miles short of making it back to his home runway. Apparently, the Air Force Pararescue had already scooped him up—alive but banged up…and probably done flying for good.
Not if I can help it, Judah Montgomery thought in response to knowing exactly how the military worked. “Find out where they took him, Specialist,” Colonel Montgomery ordered. That man had the balls to stay in the fight, Montgomery thought. And we don’t leave anyone behind.
CHAPTER 1
The Pentagon
Buzz. The older government-issued iPhone silently vibrated with two short bursts in Lou’s right pants pocket next to his thin wallet. He was finishing washing his hands after draining the afternoon coffee. A work email, he knew by the two short bursts, which distinguished it from a text. He would just wait the two minutes until he got back to his desk. The forty-one-year-old ‘light colonel’ checked the button line—or ‘gig line’—on his light blue shirt, ensuring it was perfectly in line with his dark blue trouser zipper. He left the bathroom in the Pentagon’s C-ring, the closest facility to his office, nearly getting run over as he did.
“What the—?” he exclaimed, quickly cutting himself off. The hall was alive with commotion, and active duty and civilians alike were scurrying about—some back to their offices, others to somewhere they’d just been summoned. Something’s happened, Lou thought, concerned. This feels big. Like 9-11 big. In thirty-five seconds he’d dodged two more near collisions, darting down the highly polished, off-white tile floor of the long hall and making the left turn back into his office. The non-descript wood door led to a not-so exciting office staffed by mid-level officers of every branch.
United States Air Force Lt. Col. Freeman Louis Caldwell, Lou to his friends, was but one of twenty men and women who comprised the Inter-Service Task Force for Consideration of Consolidation. The ITFCC was deep into a several year study and evaluation of every pro-and-con and nook-and-cranny of what it would mean for all branches of the U.S. Military to merge under one banner. Their collective roles were pretty far down the pecking order of units that would be scrambled for… Whatever the hell this is, Lou thought.
He swiped his badge in the card reader and entered the large monotonous room. He was fortunate enough to share one of the individual offices on the far wall with another Air Force officer. There were three other combined offices. The remaining ten officers with two civilian project managers shared the common space in the center with stereotypical cubicle walls. At the far left was a conference room which was visible behind a glass wall. He could see most of the staff cramming in there as one of the Army majors was trying to log in to the room’s computer and pull a feed up on the seventy-two-inch monitor.
Lou pulled the phone out and scanned it as he started walking that direction. He hadn’t even managed to get through his password entry by the time he reached the room. He dropped the phone back into his uniform trouser pocket.
“What’s going on?” he mumbled to Air Force Major Pete Soffet, his office mate. The DOD logo that had been playing ‘Pong’ on the large monitor at the end of the room suddenly evaporated into an aerial feed.
“Mt. Rainier erupted,” Pete whispered, eyes glued to the screen. The Army major had logged onto a secure Pentagon feed. “But before that they had an earthquake.”
“Yeah, earlier,” Lou concurred. “A few hours ago, like a 7.0, or somethin’.”
“No.” Pete corrected, looking at Lou. “Just now. Didn’t you see the email? They’re saying this thing was huge—in the ballpark of nine. Or bigger,” he added.
Lou let out a low whistle. “That’s gonna leave a mark,” he said to nobody in particular.
“Who’s flying the drone?” he heard one of the team members ask on the far side of the conference table. People had started seating themselves, mesmerized by the giant dark-gray fist shaped column of rock and earth growing out of the south end of Puget Sound on their screen.
Good question, Lou agreed internally. What feed are we looking at here? He thought about what would’ve already been in the air somewhere within a couple of hundred miles. Probably an MQ-4 out of Whidbey Island, he thought. On an autonomous mission. The thing will fly in a high-altitude loop for hours.
He listened to one of the other officers explain to his peers that if it lost signal, there were fail-safes that would allow it to be piloted from any of several other locations around the country. “We learned the hard way a couple of times. Always have a redundant station ready to send new instructions via satellite.”
“Holy crap!” a Navy Lieutenant Commander said as the drone’s camera broke through the rain clouds over Seattle. The room grew deathly still as that totality of destruction presented itself. They could see fires everywhere. Highway overpasses were pancaked in many areas. About a third of the Seattle skyscrapers were now piles of rubble and debris being swamped by tsunami water. None of those still standing had much in the way of glass left on their window frames. Like steel skeletons, Lou thought, just as shocked as everyone else. Cargo and cruise ships had sunk and caught fire right at their piers. Destroyed vessels of all sizes littered Puget Sound as far as they could see. The waters were brown and frothy. The shorelines in many areas showed massive landslides right into the Sound, taking entire neighborhoods with them.
“Where’s the Space Needle?” another asked with a crack in his voice. Though the famed landmark was conspicuously absent, the altitude was too high for seeing fine detail. As if on cue, the drone began a rapid and steep descent.
“Someone’s obviously taken control of this thing,” one of the team members announced.
Buzz. Lou heard and felt his phone again. Buzz-buzz. Everyone had their phones on vibrate and they were all sounding at the same time. He retrieved the device as he left the conference room and headed for his own office. Can’t stand trying to read emails on these little screens. He pulled his ID card from its badge holder on his chest. When he sat at his desk, he slid it into the slot on the keyboard and punched in his PIN. As he waited for the screen to finish the log-in loop, he scanned the screen of his phone. It was a text from his wife.
[Julia] You seeing this thing in Seattle? Can you skip racquetball? We need to talk.
Lou sighed audibly. I don’t need this right now, he grumbled to himself as he queued up his computer to see if CNN or Fox News had anything to expound about the big disaster. But that wasn’t unusual—he and Julia had not had an easy go the last fourteen plus months, their marriage barely hanging on by a thread. And as happened multiple times each day, Lou felt himself begin to drift down the long, sad tunnel in his mind. Each time he thought of his wife, he also thought of their own personal apocalypse that had been the beginning of the end—their son Terrance’s suicide.
The sixteen-year-old had it all seemingly so well. He was a varsity starter on the football team and had recently obtained his driver’s license. Lou had felt the double-crush of both regret and guilt ever since that horrendous day. Still officially a pilot, he had up to that point been the primary co-pilot for the C-17 that flew The Beast—the Presidential limo—ahead whenever he or she travelled. When he reported his family tragedy to his Commanding Officer, the Air Force had rightfully and understandably removed Lou’s status as a flight-qualified officer. It was a protocol to allow flight crew time to grieve—and prove they were still mentally sound. It was the second and final time Lou had lost flight status in his career.
He had travelled a lot before that day, as most crew in the 89th Airlift Wing did—often and consistently. And in the course of his career after that fateful plane crash in Afghanistan, he’d worked hard to re-establish himself as a trustworthy pilot and officer, somehow managing to keep flight status in the cargo delivery portions of the branch. It was due to this life of long and unpredictable absences that Julia had since blamed Lou for being the ghost-father that had ultimately led to their son’s decision. And try as he might to hold the marriage together, it just didn’t seem in the cards—a person could only stand the sight of someone they came to hate for so long. Is this the day? Lou asked himself as he re-read the text.
To add gas to the fire, in the months after Terrance’s funeral, Lou had taken to alcohol for comfort—a lot. I’m allowed, he told himself nightly as he felt the cold buzz start to dampen the deeply embedded depression. To hell with anyone who doesn’t get that. Still, the Air Force noticed. His attendance had started to suffer, as did his punctuality on the days he did make it to work. Eight months earlier he’d been transferred to the current task force he was on, a clear message that both he and the Air Force were merely buying time until his commission expired. At 5’10”, Lou wasn’t an overly big man to begin with. But the sedentary job and nightly love affair with Pendleton whiskey had grown the pooch over his belt-buckle. He hated sunny days because his shadow was a mirror that didn’t play tricks on his mind about it.
Lou had started to play racquetball three days a week as a coping mechanism. In his forethought, he figured it was about trying to stay fit. Deeper in his psyche, it was just one more way to avoid going home. Ironically, it was Julia that wanted to sell the house. After the suicide of their only child, she left her career in real estate to mourn and never went back. She couldn’t stand the thought of living in the same house her sole baby had hung himself in. Many fights in recent months had revolved around the collision of that fact and Lou’s desire to stay—it was the last and only place he still felt connected to his son’s memory. His counselor had told him that despite popular misconception, the divorce rate for parents in his circumstance was not significantly different than for other groups. In Lou’s mind, despite loving and wanting to reconcile with Julia, divorce was a matter of time—though he refused to be the one to pull the trigger.
Lou ignored his booted computer and yanked his access card out of the slot on the keyboard. He scanned his wristwatch and stood. 1610, he saw. Must be early afternoon in Seattle. Those folks are in for a whole different world. He grabbed his brown A-2 bomber jacket off the coat stand near the door on his way back into the larger office space. Still technically a pilot, he was allowed to wear it with his service blue uniform, and it was much more comfortable on a bright and chilly October D.C. day. Drinks are half off ‘til 6 on Tuesdays at The Stowaway, he remembered. I guess I can skip stopping in just this once, he lied to himself.
***
Southwest of Tucson, Arizona
The fall desert sun would soon move from its zenith to start skewing west over Mt. Ruby in the Pajarita Wilderness. Luckily, the autumn days were better for patrols than those super-hot days of mid-July, but the trade-off was longer shadows in the evenings and much chillier nights. The preserve was a safe refuge for migratory birds, part of the Coronado National Forest.
Forty-nine-year-old Granger Madison was stumped, sure that this old route for smugglers would’ve reopened by now. He and his all-volunteer force of veterans had but one mission every time they braved the hot days and cold nights in the Arizona desert—find and report human traffickers.
This wasn’t your average band of mostly well-meaning and sometimes-chubby American patriots fighting the surge of people trying to cross the southern border. Some of those groups had gained notoriety in the recent decade, sometimes due to unfair treatment by the press, sometimes due to their own poor decisions. Granger’s Road Runners were a tight-knit group of combat veterans who went to great lengths to stay quiet about what they did. Their mission wasn’t about coyotes smuggling poor people, most of whom just wanted to better their chances in life. As egregious as that tragic tale was for those refuge-seekers…as much as Granger wished he could just start sniping the coyotes…he knew it would be like fighting the tide. His team’s mission had been solely about finding the cartels—those who had evolved beyond the role of coyote into experts at smuggling narcotics, weapons, and children sex-slaves. In the nearly eight years since his team had formed—just he and one other at the very beginning—they had reported twelve routes to the United States Custom and Border Protection branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
There were six Road Runners in all. Three other seasoned operators joined Granger to make a patrol that would plant themselves for several days—each of them a veteran in long range reconnaissance patrols in the Army, Navy or Marines. The other two were both capable as a support crew, a pair of older and less-agile vets. These men would drop off and pick up the Road Runners with the intent of leaving no evidence that the team was even out there—they were the insertion and extraction team. Those men were all-in, too—even from the comfort of home, they had to be ready to respond at any moment the entire time the Runners were in the field.
As a civilian group, Granger’s men tried to play by the rules—mostly. Regarding communications, they all used HAM capable radios, though their primary form of communication was simply a group text. They found cell signal to be spotty in the valleys and slopes and somewhat reliable near the crests of the sage covered mountains. Each of them had a mesh network antenna they would set up with a small foldable solar panel, and their phones could text each other quite reliably in a private chat, even when they would spread themselves out. At that moment, Granger had an earbud inserted from the HAM radio, listening to an AM channel blare a classic rock song, a small measure to keep the mind awake when staring at nothing active in the desert. He didn’t do that but for a few minutes every hour or two, not wanting to lose focus on why he was out there.
“So as Boston winds down…if you’ve been living under a rock today,” he heard the afternoon DJ commence, “we have an update on that nasty event near Seattle. A massive earthquake that the USGS estimates as being nine-point-oh on the Richter scale struck the coast of Washington State. Mt. Rainier has erupted. California and several other states are reporting blackouts, and several corporations are now reporting issues with accessing their cloud-based storage. Relief efforts here in the Tucson area have already started. Please go to the Red Cross website…” Granger shut down the radio and picked up his phone. Nothing from Claude or Bob… he thought. His support team was part of the group text.
[Granger] How bad is this Seattle thing, Bob?
[Bob] Bad. Too big to describe here.
[Granger] Roger. Pick us up at Extract 1 in 3 hours. Thx.
[Granger] Unless anyone has anything new, let’s pack it and meet at RP6 in 30. Will explain then.
After the usual replies, Granger began to square away his position. After putting away the binoculars, radio, and small remnants of MRE trash, he rolled up the sniper’s mat he always used to lay on the desert floor. He then used a piece of scrub brush to wipe away the tracks in the sand his body and mat had made laying there. They always worked in pairs, so he’d be meeting up with Dave Wolf in just a few minutes as they hiked to the far end of their valley, down into the basin to meet Tracy and Mick at Rally Point Six. This route is dry anyhow, he mused a bit disappointedly. He stood and stretched, confident nobody had been counter-surveilling the valley after having been in control of it for forty hours.
The medically retired Tucson firefighter double-checked the hole he’d been using as a waste-privy, covering it with one more mound of dirt and a few stones. As a young man in the Marines’ Force Recon—once again called Raiders—he used to enjoy the alone time in the brush as a form of proving his mental toughness. Now at forty-nine, it was solace—a respite from a society he was feeling less a part of, particularly since the fire that ended his career and covered the left side of his face and shoulder and the back of his legs in scar tissue.
The plastic appearance that ran from his left eyebrow down across his now-malformed ear and all the way to his left shoulder usually drew strange looks in grocery stores. The burns had been only second degree on the shoulder, thanks to the Kevlar and Nomex in his bunker gear. The side effect of that, though, was that not all the nerves had been killed. It was somewhat painful to wear a backpack. In the years he’d been running the Road Runners, he’d morphed his system into a right-shoulder-only sling-pack. The graying 5’11” Granger slung his pack and wrapped the waist belt around, ready to start moving toward Wolf. I think we need to look farther west.
***
Joint Base Andrews
The VH-60N carrying President Jeremiah Allen and First Lady Francis Allen approached and settled on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews a little after 9 PM. POTUS, call sign “Snake Charmer” to the United States Secret Service, had finished a series of meetings in the West Wing as quickly as he could. He wholeheartedly agreed with his Chief of Staff that they should get to the west coast as quickly as reasonable to survey the damage from the mega-disaster. It was the presidential thing to do.
After the last “presidential shuffle,” Marine One wound up in the left-rear number-four-spot of the constantly shifting diamond formation. The five helicopters—Marine One and four decoys—constantly shuffled whenever Snake Charmer flew, an active security precaution to ensure an engaged enemy would have his hands full trying to shoot down the correct rotor wing aircraft. This was one of several craft the Marines used to shuttle the President, and usually the model sent for a rapid pickup and drop off that hadn’t been planned.
Snake Charmer’s primary protection agent stepped out of the craft first and assumed a position just past the Marines who had opened the hatch. The Marines, in dress blue uniform, saluted sharply as President Allen passed by after stepping out of the forest green craft. He held his hand back toward the craft to assist his wife down the one folding step and onto the tarmac. He returned the salute, always uncomfortable that he was breaking some sort of protocol doing it. They began their procession toward the Boeing 747, known to the Air Force as VC-25A and the rest of the world as Air Force One.
Chief of Staff Shannon Sahr and Julia Jacobs, Jeremiah’s personal assistant, were waiting at the drivable tarmac stairs that abutted the aircraft, along with a few other Secret Service agents. Most of the staff and invited press corps were already on board. About one hundred yards to the right of the president’s approach was a facility that ushered people through the “cleared to board” procedures.
“Would you get Secretaries Smith and Williamson on a video call as soon as we’re past takeoff?” Jeremiah asked Shannon before she could say a thing.
“First thing, sir.”
Shannon had already been dealing with the Secretaries’ staffs all afternoon, as it were. The Secretaries of Energy and Interior would be the most directly in the public eye aside from President Allen. It was mere bad timing that they couldn’t be on the flight. Secretary Craig Smith had been at an energy conference among his European peers that week in Switzerland. Secretary Lashay Williamson was on personal leave in Indiana. She was already arranging her own tour to start the next day.
The entire entourage hurried into the plane so they could get airborne and maybe catch a little shut eye before they got to the Rainier Impact Zone. The craft was buzzing with the normal beehive of activity that always accompanied the president. Some military personnel were double and triple-checking their pre-flight tasks. Others were already fully on-line at their communications stations in the big craft’s “hump” aft of the cockpit. Various Secret Service and members of the president’s staff were getting themselves situated for the flight.
President Allen turned right to head back toward the conference room, completely ignoring his office. All chairs on Air Force One were capable of being secured for take-off and landing. No need to wait, he thought. Francis made the left to take her spot in the Presidential bedroom in the plane’s nose. Jeremiah waved off the usual chorus of “G’evening, Mr. President” echoing from everyone he passed on the way.
“Good evening, all. Look—sorry to drag you all away from your loved ones on such short notice.” He genuinely was sorry.
The former Pennsylvania steel-mill manager turned politician had always connected with people. It was his strength. Born in Ohio, the son of the mill’s superintendent went to work in the family business right out of college. Early on, he was able to bridge a fiercely growing divide between labor and management, something that did not go unnoticed by the local Democratic party members. The course of his life had been a slow progression through state and federal positions. The bulk of his career had been as a congressman, though four years before he ran for president, he switched from the Democrat party to the Libertarian party.
Jeremiah Ethan Allen had become disenfranchised with his party in recent years, feeling that the growing love for political dissention in America made the time ripe for a strong third party to grow. Unlike the Green and Constitution parties, he felt the Libertarian party was less divisive, able to appeal to reasonable minded folks from both sides of the aisle. He was the first Libertarian to be elected to Congress, and the following cycle two-years later, eight more Libertarians had been elected to the House and one to the Senate. When he ran for and won the Presidential nomination that election cycle, the media had done their very best to paint any votes for him as a waste, no matter which party he was stealing them from. It was truly a sign of the strength and foresight behind the Constitution, as he won the requisite electoral votes by a thin margin over both of the major party candidates.
Grabbing a seat along the side of the long table, he got right to it as Shannon and the rest of the key staff filed in. “Before we discuss the horrifying death toll predictions again, let’s start with the things we can look at outside the destruction area. Transportation.” His assistant Julia brought him an iced lemonade without asking.
Shannon was seated to his immediate left and nodded toward one of her staffers crammed into the room. “Go ahead, Terrell.”
“Mr. President.” The staffers almost always began with a direct address to Jeremiah. It was a protocol he hated and had tried more than once to order stopped, to no avail. “Secretary Vu’s staff reports all major shippers, both domestic and international, are aware of the issue and are taking steps to conduct redirects on land and sea to every port from Oakland-San Francisco and south. The port at Eureka in northern California was wiped out by the tsunami. Long Beach is expected to take the brunt of the overflow. The initial reports of trucks and containers lost today is based on tracking devices that went off-grid—currently over 2,500 trucks. Counting containers of goods lost in the Seattle-Tacoma area and ships that were capsized in the tsunami, the estimate is over one-hundred and twenty thousand. Both numbers are expected to rise.”
After two more minutes of the shipping and transportation report, Jeremiah’s mind wandered to the infrastructure issues already being felt. “Thanks, Terrell. Who has energy? I want to know how California will be handling all of this extra shipping.”
“Mr. President,” stated Sam Gilson, Shannon’s operations director. “Bunky is still in the communications center arranging the video chat with Secretary Smith. Despite coal plants only comprising point-four percent of California’s energy plants, thirty-three percent of what they use is coal powered, purchased from the surrounding states. They’ve made big strides toward solar, but the output will fall as it gets closer to winter. The loss of hydroelectric from Washington and Oregon will hurt them, but it won’t cripple them.” He went silent for one second before adding, “Yet.”
“Yet,” the president caught. “Meaning what?”
“The secretary’s staff was emphasizing the domino effect from today’s events. As the demand for coal and natural gas increases in all western states from the loss of hydroelectric, those states will be selling less to California. But as California demands more for an exponential amount of port traffic, the trucks needed to haul the coal won’t be available — compounded by the loss of trucks and qualified drivers today. Then there’s the human factor…”
“People getting tired and such,” Shannon added.
“Partially,” Sam said. “But I guess I was referring to a more primal pessimism.”
“You’ve opened the door, Sam,” Jeremiah said patiently. “Just walk through it.”
“I guess I’m looking down the road, sir. What happens when people who make their money online, not just corporations, but the thirty-three percent of people at the bottom of middle-class—can’t work from home because the electricity isn’t there. Or the internet.”
This made everyone in the room get quiet for an unusual eight seconds, only to be broken by an announcement from the co-pilot that they were preparing to takeoff. Very little information was available this early into the catastrophe. The plan was to avoid the ash plume from Mt. Rainier while en route. The crew would attempt to find out the status of SeaTac Airport on the way. Initial reports from scout planes were bleak at best.
“If nothing else,” Shannon had told the president two hours before they departed, “we can always land in Portland and drive up.”
PROLOGUE
Over the Hindu Kush Mountains, Afghanistan
“Danger close!” 1st Lt. Freeman Louis “Super Bert” Caldwell heard in his helmet headset. “T-Man is on the ridges to our north, west, and southwest. One hundred meters and closing!”
Caldwell knew that was what the Joes called the Taliban. It sounded like the mother of all firefights raging in the background. Americans were about to die.
“Bert, I just went Bingo,” he heard his wingman say. Captain Scott “Snooze N” Nethers was his closest squadron buddy and mentor. He was letting Bert know that he was now at the point in his fuel level that he had to make the twenty-five-minute flight back to base and land. The pair of Fairchild Republic A10 Thunderbolts—known affectionately by the ground troops as the “Warthog”—had been providing close air support for almost three hours. They had already performed an aerial refueling before receiving the call for support, meaning they were now bound to return to base. Not that it mattered—both planes had already run themselves low on ammo.
“I’m good,” Super Bert Caldwell replied. “I can make at least two more passes!”
“You’re full of it! Let’s go. Ratchet and Clank will be on site in thirty minutes.” Snooze ordered.
“Listen to those guys, Snooze!” the young pilot countered. He was three months into his first combat tour after college and training. “They’re surrounded and cut-off from their QRF! They don’t have thirty minutes!”
“Bert! Stop!” the more seasoned pilot warned the rookie. “See that fog that’s rolling in?!”
It was too late. Freeman Caldwell—Lou to his friends back home—lined up on the southwest-to northeast approach into the valley once more, disappearing from Snooze’s view as he did. The greenish-brown electronic map in the upper-left corner of his cockpit dashboard moved the mountains slowly as he once again progressed along the canyon walls. He reached down to his left. He felt for the correct switch to move from the HF frequency he had been talking to his wingman back to FM.
“Echo 3, this is Whisky Flight 2! Keep your heads down!”
Super Bert reached down to near his left hip and flipped the little red safety cover over the power cutout to his GAU-8 30mm cannon. He was hot, once again, to spew his depleted uranium projectiles into the enemies of brethren unmet. He had achieved his nickname as a token of supposed embarrassment from his squadron mates. The seven-barrel rotary cannon in the Warthog’s nose makes a very loud “brrrt” belch-type sound when firing at its fixed 3,900 rounds-per-minute rate. Pilots would normally fire in one to less-than-two second bursts. Super Bert had demonstrated the ability to make precise micro adjustments in flight, engaging as many as fifteen percent more targets on each pass when compared to his peers.
Left hand on his throttle, he trimmed his ailerons and reduced throttle just a bit, nudging his right hand on the joystick a hair left as he did. He was trying to get right in line with the top of a canyon wall he could no longer see due to incoming fog. The reduction in throttle caused a slight loss of lift. He couldn’t mess with this technique too much—the cannon was calibrated to shoot 4000 feet ahead when the craft was at a down-attitude of thirty degrees. Sweat built on his brow under the already hot helmet. Super Bert shot his eyes back and forth from the left side display, his heads-up display, and the window, nervously trying to find the top of the canyon. A quick altimeter check…one last look at the HUD…
BRRRRRRTTTTT….BRRRRRTTTTTT….BRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTT! Lou Caldwell hit the throttle and re-engaged the cannon’s safety switch, pulling slightly back on the yoke. If he had the fuel to make one more pass, he didn’t want to waste it climbing to altitude and rolling over to look when visibility was garbage anyhow.
“Whiskey Flight 2, Echo 3!” he heard the ground troops’ TACP, or Tactical Air Control Party, call him once more. “Nice shooting, flyboy!” The operator on the ground had the training and expertise to manage all aircraft involved in the mission. “Stand by! Standby. EVAC units are inbound! Visibility is nil. Copy?”
“Copy, Echo 3. I’m past Bingo. You’ll have Whiskey 3 on scene in ten mikes,” he said in the military radio jargon that meant ten minutes. “I’m RTB.”
“Echo 3 copies.” As Super Bert began to head back to Bagram Air Base, he switched his radio back to pre-programmed HF frequency and began the procession home.
***
Back in FOB Camaro near Jalalabad, a senior colonel had been listening to the entire operation from the Tactical Operations Center. The Brigadier General-select had already been given his flag announcement, due to take over as Inter-Agency Operations Director at Joint Special Operations command as a new general in two months. His Rangers had been stuck on this Charlie Foxtrot mission for almost two days, and he wasn’t going to sleep until they were home. It wasn’t until two hours later that one of the TOC’s radio technicians informed him that they heard Whiskey Flight 2 had crashed four miles short of making it back to his home runway. Apparently, the Air Force Pararescue had already scooped him up—alive but banged up…and probably done flying for good.
Not if I can help it, Judah Montgomery thought in response to knowing exactly how the military worked. “Find out where they took him, Specialist,” Colonel Montgomery ordered. That man had the balls to stay in the fight, Montgomery thought. And we don’t leave anyone behind.
CHAPTER 1
The Pentagon
Buzz. The older government-issued iPhone silently vibrated with two short bursts in Lou’s right pants pocket next to his thin wallet. He was finishing washing his hands after draining the afternoon coffee. A work email, he knew by the two short bursts, which distinguished it from a text. He would just wait the two minutes until he got back to his desk. The forty-one-year-old ‘light colonel’ checked the button line—or ‘gig line’—on his light blue shirt, ensuring it was perfectly in line with his dark blue trouser zipper. He left the bathroom in the Pentagon’s C-ring, the closest facility to his office, nearly getting run over as he did.
“What the—?” he exclaimed, quickly cutting himself off. The hall was alive with commotion, and active duty and civilians alike were scurrying about—some back to their offices, others to somewhere they’d just been summoned. Something’s happened, Lou thought, concerned. This feels big. Like 9-11 big. In thirty-five seconds he’d dodged two more near collisions, darting down the highly polished, off-white tile floor of the long hall and making the left turn back into his office. The non-descript wood door led to a not-so exciting office staffed by mid-level officers of every branch.
United States Air Force Lt. Col. Freeman Louis Caldwell, Lou to his friends, was but one of twenty men and women who comprised the Inter-Service Task Force for Consideration of Consolidation. The ITFCC was deep into a several year study and evaluation of every pro-and-con and nook-and-cranny of what it would mean for all branches of the U.S. Military to merge under one banner. Their collective roles were pretty far down the pecking order of units that would be scrambled for… Whatever the hell this is, Lou thought.
He swiped his badge in the card reader and entered the large monotonous room. He was fortunate enough to share one of the individual offices on the far wall with another Air Force officer. There were three other combined offices. The remaining ten officers with two civilian project managers shared the common space in the center with stereotypical cubicle walls. At the far left was a conference room which was visible behind a glass wall. He could see most of the staff cramming in there as one of the Army majors was trying to log in to the room’s computer and pull a feed up on the seventy-two-inch monitor.
Lou pulled the phone out and scanned it as he started walking that direction. He hadn’t even managed to get through his password entry by the time he reached the room. He dropped the phone back into his uniform trouser pocket.
“What’s going on?” he mumbled to Air Force Major Pete Soffet, his office mate. The DOD logo that had been playing ‘Pong’ on the large monitor at the end of the room suddenly evaporated into an aerial feed.
“Mt. Rainier erupted,” Pete whispered, eyes glued to the screen. The Army major had logged onto a secure Pentagon feed. “But before that they had an earthquake.”
“Yeah, earlier,” Lou concurred. “A few hours ago, like a 7.0, or somethin’.”
“No.” Pete corrected, looking at Lou. “Just now. Didn’t you see the email? They’re saying this thing was huge—in the ballpark of nine. Or bigger,” he added.
Lou let out a low whistle. “That’s gonna leave a mark,” he said to nobody in particular.
“Who’s flying the drone?” he heard one of the team members ask on the far side of the conference table. People had started seating themselves, mesmerized by the giant dark-gray fist shaped column of rock and earth growing out of the south end of Puget Sound on their screen.
Good question, Lou agreed internally. What feed are we looking at here? He thought about what would’ve already been in the air somewhere within a couple of hundred miles. Probably an MQ-4 out of Whidbey Island, he thought. On an autonomous mission. The thing will fly in a high-altitude loop for hours.
He listened to one of the other officers explain to his peers that if it lost signal, there were fail-safes that would allow it to be piloted from any of several other locations around the country. “We learned the hard way a couple of times. Always have a redundant station ready to send new instructions via satellite.”
“Holy crap!” a Navy Lieutenant Commander said as the drone’s camera broke through the rain clouds over Seattle. The room grew deathly still as that totality of destruction presented itself. They could see fires everywhere. Highway overpasses were pancaked in many areas. About a third of the Seattle skyscrapers were now piles of rubble and debris being swamped by tsunami water. None of those still standing had much in the way of glass left on their window frames. Like steel skeletons, Lou thought, just as shocked as everyone else. Cargo and cruise ships had sunk and caught fire right at their piers. Destroyed vessels of all sizes littered Puget Sound as far as they could see. The waters were brown and frothy. The shorelines in many areas showed massive landslides right into the Sound, taking entire neighborhoods with them.
“Where’s the Space Needle?” another asked with a crack in his voice. Though the famed landmark was conspicuously absent, the altitude was too high for seeing fine detail. As if on cue, the drone began a rapid and steep descent.
“Someone’s obviously taken control of this thing,” one of the team members announced.
Buzz. Lou heard and felt his phone again. Buzz-buzz. Everyone had their phones on vibrate and they were all sounding at the same time. He retrieved the device as he left the conference room and headed for his own office. Can’t stand trying to read emails on these little screens. He pulled his ID card from its badge holder on his chest. When he sat at his desk, he slid it into the slot on the keyboard and punched in his PIN. As he waited for the screen to finish the log-in loop, he scanned the screen of his phone. It was a text from his wife.
[Julia] You seeing this thing in Seattle? Can you skip racquetball? We need to talk.
Lou sighed audibly. I don’t need this right now, he grumbled to himself as he queued up his computer to see if CNN or Fox News had anything to expound about the big disaster. But that wasn’t unusual—he and Julia had not had an easy go the last fourteen plus months, their marriage barely hanging on by a thread. And as happened multiple times each day, Lou felt himself begin to drift down the long, sad tunnel in his mind. Each time he thought of his wife, he also thought of their own personal apocalypse that had been the beginning of the end—their son Terrance’s suicide.
The sixteen-year-old had it all seemingly so well. He was a varsity starter on the football team and had recently obtained his driver’s license. Lou had felt the double-crush of both regret and guilt ever since that horrendous day. Still officially a pilot, he had up to that point been the primary co-pilot for the C-17 that flew The Beast—the Presidential limo—ahead whenever he or she travelled. When he reported his family tragedy to his Commanding Officer, the Air Force had rightfully and understandably removed Lou’s status as a flight-qualified officer. It was a protocol to allow flight crew time to grieve—and prove they were still mentally sound. It was the second and final time Lou had lost flight status in his career.
He had travelled a lot before that day, as most crew in the 89th Airlift Wing did—often and consistently. And in the course of his career after that fateful plane crash in Afghanistan, he’d worked hard to re-establish himself as a trustworthy pilot and officer, somehow managing to keep flight status in the cargo delivery portions of the branch. It was due to this life of long and unpredictable absences that Julia had since blamed Lou for being the ghost-father that had ultimately led to their son’s decision. And try as he might to hold the marriage together, it just didn’t seem in the cards—a person could only stand the sight of someone they came to hate for so long. Is this the day? Lou asked himself as he re-read the text.
To add gas to the fire, in the months after Terrance’s funeral, Lou had taken to alcohol for comfort—a lot. I’m allowed, he told himself nightly as he felt the cold buzz start to dampen the deeply embedded depression. To hell with anyone who doesn’t get that. Still, the Air Force noticed. His attendance had started to suffer, as did his punctuality on the days he did make it to work. Eight months earlier he’d been transferred to the current task force he was on, a clear message that both he and the Air Force were merely buying time until his commission expired. At 5’10”, Lou wasn’t an overly big man to begin with. But the sedentary job and nightly love affair with Pendleton whiskey had grown the pooch over his belt-buckle. He hated sunny days because his shadow was a mirror that didn’t play tricks on his mind about it.
Lou had started to play racquetball three days a week as a coping mechanism. In his forethought, he figured it was about trying to stay fit. Deeper in his psyche, it was just one more way to avoid going home. Ironically, it was Julia that wanted to sell the house. After the suicide of their only child, she left her career in real estate to mourn and never went back. She couldn’t stand the thought of living in the same house her sole baby had hung himself in. Many fights in recent months had revolved around the collision of that fact and Lou’s desire to stay—it was the last and only place he still felt connected to his son’s memory. His counselor had told him that despite popular misconception, the divorce rate for parents in his circumstance was not significantly different than for other groups. In Lou’s mind, despite loving and wanting to reconcile with Julia, divorce was a matter of time—though he refused to be the one to pull the trigger.
Lou ignored his booted computer and yanked his access card out of the slot on the keyboard. He scanned his wristwatch and stood. 1610, he saw. Must be early afternoon in Seattle. Those folks are in for a whole different world. He grabbed his brown A-2 bomber jacket off the coat stand near the door on his way back into the larger office space. Still technically a pilot, he was allowed to wear it with his service blue uniform, and it was much more comfortable on a bright and chilly October D.C. day. Drinks are half off ‘til 6 on Tuesdays at The Stowaway, he remembered. I guess I can skip stopping in just this once, he lied to himself.
***
Southwest of Tucson, Arizona
The fall desert sun would soon move from its zenith to start skewing west over Mt. Ruby in the Pajarita Wilderness. Luckily, the autumn days were better for patrols than those super-hot days of mid-July, but the trade-off was longer shadows in the evenings and much chillier nights. The preserve was a safe refuge for migratory birds, part of the Coronado National Forest.
Forty-nine-year-old Granger Madison was stumped, sure that this old route for smugglers would’ve reopened by now. He and his all-volunteer force of veterans had but one mission every time they braved the hot days and cold nights in the Arizona desert—find and report human traffickers.
This wasn’t your average band of mostly well-meaning and sometimes-chubby American patriots fighting the surge of people trying to cross the southern border. Some of those groups had gained notoriety in the recent decade, sometimes due to unfair treatment by the press, sometimes due to their own poor decisions. Granger’s Road Runners were a tight-knit group of combat veterans who went to great lengths to stay quiet about what they did. Their mission wasn’t about coyotes smuggling poor people, most of whom just wanted to better their chances in life. As egregious as that tragic tale was for those refuge-seekers…as much as Granger wished he could just start sniping the coyotes…he knew it would be like fighting the tide. His team’s mission had been solely about finding the cartels—those who had evolved beyond the role of coyote into experts at smuggling narcotics, weapons, and children sex-slaves. In the nearly eight years since his team had formed—just he and one other at the very beginning—they had reported twelve routes to the United States Custom and Border Protection branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
There were six Road Runners in all. Three other seasoned operators joined Granger to make a patrol that would plant themselves for several days—each of them a veteran in long range reconnaissance patrols in the Army, Navy or Marines. The other two were both capable as a support crew, a pair of older and less-agile vets. These men would drop off and pick up the Road Runners with the intent of leaving no evidence that the team was even out there—they were the insertion and extraction team. Those men were all-in, too—even from the comfort of home, they had to be ready to respond at any moment the entire time the Runners were in the field.
As a civilian group, Granger’s men tried to play by the rules—mostly. Regarding communications, they all used HAM capable radios, though their primary form of communication was simply a group text. They found cell signal to be spotty in the valleys and slopes and somewhat reliable near the crests of the sage covered mountains. Each of them had a mesh network antenna they would set up with a small foldable solar panel, and their phones could text each other quite reliably in a private chat, even when they would spread themselves out. At that moment, Granger had an earbud inserted from the HAM radio, listening to an AM channel blare a classic rock song, a small measure to keep the mind awake when staring at nothing active in the desert. He didn’t do that but for a few minutes every hour or two, not wanting to lose focus on why he was out there.
“So as Boston winds down…if you’ve been living under a rock today,” he heard the afternoon DJ commence, “we have an update on that nasty event near Seattle. A massive earthquake that the USGS estimates as being nine-point-oh on the Richter scale struck the coast of Washington State. Mt. Rainier has erupted. California and several other states are reporting blackouts, and several corporations are now reporting issues with accessing their cloud-based storage. Relief efforts here in the Tucson area have already started. Please go to the Red Cross website…” Granger shut down the radio and picked up his phone. Nothing from Claude or Bob… he thought. His support team was part of the group text.
[Granger] How bad is this Seattle thing, Bob?
[Bob] Bad. Too big to describe here.
[Granger] Roger. Pick us up at Extract 1 in 3 hours. Thx.
[Granger] Unless anyone has anything new, let’s pack it and meet at RP6 in 30. Will explain then.
After the usual replies, Granger began to square away his position. After putting away the binoculars, radio, and small remnants of MRE trash, he rolled up the sniper’s mat he always used to lay on the desert floor. He then used a piece of scrub brush to wipe away the tracks in the sand his body and mat had made laying there. They always worked in pairs, so he’d be meeting up with Dave Wolf in just a few minutes as they hiked to the far end of their valley, down into the basin to meet Tracy and Mick at Rally Point Six. This route is dry anyhow, he mused a bit disappointedly. He stood and stretched, confident nobody had been counter-surveilling the valley after having been in control of it for forty hours.
The medically retired Tucson firefighter double-checked the hole he’d been using as a waste-privy, covering it with one more mound of dirt and a few stones. As a young man in the Marines’ Force Recon—once again called Raiders—he used to enjoy the alone time in the brush as a form of proving his mental toughness. Now at forty-nine, it was solace—a respite from a society he was feeling less a part of, particularly since the fire that ended his career and covered the left side of his face and shoulder and the back of his legs in scar tissue.
The plastic appearance that ran from his left eyebrow down across his now-malformed ear and all the way to his left shoulder usually drew strange looks in grocery stores. The burns had been only second degree on the shoulder, thanks to the Kevlar and Nomex in his bunker gear. The side effect of that, though, was that not all the nerves had been killed. It was somewhat painful to wear a backpack. In the years he’d been running the Road Runners, he’d morphed his system into a right-shoulder-only sling-pack. The graying 5’11” Granger slung his pack and wrapped the waist belt around, ready to start moving toward Wolf. I think we need to look farther west.
***
Joint Base Andrews
The VH-60N carrying President Jeremiah Allen and First Lady Francis Allen approached and settled on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews a little after 9 PM. POTUS, call sign “Snake Charmer” to the United States Secret Service, had finished a series of meetings in the West Wing as quickly as he could. He wholeheartedly agreed with his Chief of Staff that they should get to the west coast as quickly as reasonable to survey the damage from the mega-disaster. It was the presidential thing to do.
After the last “presidential shuffle,” Marine One wound up in the left-rear number-four-spot of the constantly shifting diamond formation. The five helicopters—Marine One and four decoys—constantly shuffled whenever Snake Charmer flew, an active security precaution to ensure an engaged enemy would have his hands full trying to shoot down the correct rotor wing aircraft. This was one of several craft the Marines used to shuttle the President, and usually the model sent for a rapid pickup and drop off that hadn’t been planned.
Snake Charmer’s primary protection agent stepped out of the craft first and assumed a position just past the Marines who had opened the hatch. The Marines, in dress blue uniform, saluted sharply as President Allen passed by after stepping out of the forest green craft. He held his hand back toward the craft to assist his wife down the one folding step and onto the tarmac. He returned the salute, always uncomfortable that he was breaking some sort of protocol doing it. They began their procession toward the Boeing 747, known to the Air Force as VC-25A and the rest of the world as Air Force One.
Chief of Staff Shannon Sahr and Julia Jacobs, Jeremiah’s personal assistant, were waiting at the drivable tarmac stairs that abutted the aircraft, along with a few other Secret Service agents. Most of the staff and invited press corps were already on board. About one hundred yards to the right of the president’s approach was a facility that ushered people through the “cleared to board” procedures.
“Would you get Secretaries Smith and Williamson on a video call as soon as we’re past takeoff?” Jeremiah asked Shannon before she could say a thing.
“First thing, sir.”
Shannon had already been dealing with the Secretaries’ staffs all afternoon, as it were. The Secretaries of Energy and Interior would be the most directly in the public eye aside from President Allen. It was mere bad timing that they couldn’t be on the flight. Secretary Craig Smith had been at an energy conference among his European peers that week in Switzerland. Secretary Lashay Williamson was on personal leave in Indiana. She was already arranging her own tour to start the next day.
The entire entourage hurried into the plane so they could get airborne and maybe catch a little shut eye before they got to the Rainier Impact Zone. The craft was buzzing with the normal beehive of activity that always accompanied the president. Some military personnel were double and triple-checking their pre-flight tasks. Others were already fully on-line at their communications stations in the big craft’s “hump” aft of the cockpit. Various Secret Service and members of the president’s staff were getting themselves situated for the flight.
President Allen turned right to head back toward the conference room, completely ignoring his office. All chairs on Air Force One were capable of being secured for take-off and landing. No need to wait, he thought. Francis made the left to take her spot in the Presidential bedroom in the plane’s nose. Jeremiah waved off the usual chorus of “G’evening, Mr. President” echoing from everyone he passed on the way.
“Good evening, all. Look—sorry to drag you all away from your loved ones on such short notice.” He genuinely was sorry.
The former Pennsylvania steel-mill manager turned politician had always connected with people. It was his strength. Born in Ohio, the son of the mill’s superintendent went to work in the family business right out of college. Early on, he was able to bridge a fiercely growing divide between labor and management, something that did not go unnoticed by the local Democratic party members. The course of his life had been a slow progression through state and federal positions. The bulk of his career had been as a congressman, though four years before he ran for president, he switched from the Democrat party to the Libertarian party.
Jeremiah Ethan Allen had become disenfranchised with his party in recent years, feeling that the growing love for political dissention in America made the time ripe for a strong third party to grow. Unlike the Green and Constitution parties, he felt the Libertarian party was less divisive, able to appeal to reasonable minded folks from both sides of the aisle. He was the first Libertarian to be elected to Congress, and the following cycle two-years later, eight more Libertarians had been elected to the House and one to the Senate. When he ran for and won the Presidential nomination that election cycle, the media had done their very best to paint any votes for him as a waste, no matter which party he was stealing them from. It was truly a sign of the strength and foresight behind the Constitution, as he won the requisite electoral votes by a thin margin over both of the major party candidates.
Grabbing a seat along the side of the long table, he got right to it as Shannon and the rest of the key staff filed in. “Before we discuss the horrifying death toll predictions again, let’s start with the things we can look at outside the destruction area. Transportation.” His assistant Julia brought him an iced lemonade without asking.
Shannon was seated to his immediate left and nodded toward one of her staffers crammed into the room. “Go ahead, Terrell.”
“Mr. President.” The staffers almost always began with a direct address to Jeremiah. It was a protocol he hated and had tried more than once to order stopped, to no avail. “Secretary Vu’s staff reports all major shippers, both domestic and international, are aware of the issue and are taking steps to conduct redirects on land and sea to every port from Oakland-San Francisco and south. The port at Eureka in northern California was wiped out by the tsunami. Long Beach is expected to take the brunt of the overflow. The initial reports of trucks and containers lost today is based on tracking devices that went off-grid—currently over 2,500 trucks. Counting containers of goods lost in the Seattle-Tacoma area and ships that were capsized in the tsunami, the estimate is over one-hundred and twenty thousand. Both numbers are expected to rise.”
After two more minutes of the shipping and transportation report, Jeremiah’s mind wandered to the infrastructure issues already being felt. “Thanks, Terrell. Who has energy? I want to know how California will be handling all of this extra shipping.”
“Mr. President,” stated Sam Gilson, Shannon’s operations director. “Bunky is still in the communications center arranging the video chat with Secretary Smith. Despite coal plants only comprising point-four percent of California’s energy plants, thirty-three percent of what they use is coal powered, purchased from the surrounding states. They’ve made big strides toward solar, but the output will fall as it gets closer to winter. The loss of hydroelectric from Washington and Oregon will hurt them, but it won’t cripple them.” He went silent for one second before adding, “Yet.”
“Yet,” the president caught. “Meaning what?”
“The secretary’s staff was emphasizing the domino effect from today’s events. As the demand for coal and natural gas increases in all western states from the loss of hydroelectric, those states will be selling less to California. But as California demands more for an exponential amount of port traffic, the trucks needed to haul the coal won’t be available — compounded by the loss of trucks and qualified drivers today. Then there’s the human factor…”
“People getting tired and such,” Shannon added.
“Partially,” Sam said. “But I guess I was referring to a more primal pessimism.”
“You’ve opened the door, Sam,” Jeremiah said patiently. “Just walk through it.”
“I guess I’m looking down the road, sir. What happens when people who make their money online, not just corporations, but the thirty-three percent of people at the bottom of middle-class—can’t work from home because the electricity isn’t there. Or the internet.”
This made everyone in the room get quiet for an unusual eight seconds, only to be broken by an announcement from the co-pilot that they were preparing to takeoff. Very little information was available this early into the catastrophe. The plan was to avoid the ash plume from Mt. Rainier while en route. The crew would attempt to find out the status of SeaTac Airport on the way. Initial reports from scout planes were bleak at best.
“If nothing else,” Shannon had told the president two hours before they departed, “we can always land in Portland and drive up.”
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